It may not be a barbecue summer but it is shaping up to be a long hot autumn.
That must be the conclusion to be drawn from the frantic activity from our
SNP masters over recent weeks.

Alex Salmond effectively abolished summer when he became First Minister just over two years ago and following the Clinton-esque maxim of “keep campaigning” he and his ministerial team maintain the same hectic pace whatever the season.

If they’re lucky his front-line team gets a bare fortnight off during the eight-week summer recess but Our Great Leader restricts himself to a few days, so as to present an image of perpetual motion and to never be caught, like poor Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary, who was unlucky enough to be on holiday when the crisis erupted over compensation payments to British servicemen.

The Scottish cabinet and a small army of officials is bussed round the country all summer long to no great effect as far as the governance of Scotland is concerned but that’s not its purpose; Mr Salmond drags this happy band to a’ the airts for party political purposes.

How and why he is allowed to get away with it is a question that only Sir John Elvidge, the country’s most senior civil servant, can answer.

This is the third year of the Salmond summer onslaught and in the sense that it shows up the apparent slothfulness of his opponents, I suppose it can be said to be working. However, this year there is a new intensity to the Nat behaviour.

Granted, they had what politicians call an “issue” in the shape of the proposed closure of the Johnnie Walker bottling plant in Kilmarnock but then such commercial occurrences are hardly rare, being impossible only in the command economies of the old Soviet bloc. What has surprised this and other commentators is the astonishing vehemence with which Mr Salmond has addressed the Diageo plan.

Then yesterday we had John Swinney, the finance minister, launching what the SNP has always dreamed of having — the Scottish Oil Fund.

This monster piggy bank would see, in a fully independent Scotland, a proportion of the revenues from North Sea Oil taxes being salted away for a rainy day. But salted away, presumably, only after all other bills had been paid — you know, hospitals, schools, roads and the like.

By the way, Mr Swinney’s event yesterday was another outrageous example of the SNP administration using public money and supposedly neutral civil servants for blatantly partisan purposes. When is Sir John Elvidge going to do something about this abuse?

Andy Kerr, Labour’s finance spokesman, claimed that as all of Scotland’s oil revenues – and more – had been spent on the above necessities, there wouldn’t have been any cash left over to start an oil fund.

It wasn’t clear from Mr Swinney how much, if anything, he plans to put aside but he’s clearly going to make an issue of that old SNP policy standby: “It’s Scotland’s Oil.”

And taken together with Mr Salmond’s tub-thumping approach to the Johnnie Walker affair, I suspect that the autumn will see the Nats turning up the gas under a whole host of issues.

They’ve hit the buffers in the Parliament and need a shot in the arm to regain their momentum. They plan to table their referendum Bill on St Andrew’s Day and although it’s got no chance of getting through, Mr Salmond needs to make it the national issue it most certainly isn’t at present.

They have their conference at Inverness in October and a by-election in Glasgow to help them stay centre stage. It all points to an autumn offensive.